Ecuador Remembers Canoe Travel from the Amazon to the Caribbean

Quito, Apr 25 (Prensa Latina) Ecuador prepares for an international event to commemorate 30 years of the canoe expedition from the Amazon to the Caribbean, scientific research travel that started in this capital and included several countries that ended in Cuba.

The venue will start with a symposium to remember the event that will take place next April 28 at the capital’s house-museum Guayasamin, while days 29 and 30 there will be a program of activities in Port Misahualli, Napo province, where navigation started.

The event will gather some of the expeditionaries, researchers, academicians, scientists, archaeologists , anthropologists and historians of Ecuador, Cuba, Peru, Mexico and Venezuela.

According to the organizers, the event also is a tribute to the managers of this study: Cuban Antonio Nuñez Jimenez, leader of the expedition, Ecuadorian painter Oswaldo Guayasamin and his fellow countryman, archaeologist Lenin Ortiz.

All documents resulting from the trip, field diaries, videos and recordings were recognized by the Organization of the United Nations for Education, Science and Culture (Unesco) as part of the archives of the Regional Memory of the World.

Simultaneously, a photo exhibition will be presented from the memory of the expedition and drawings of Fernando Salme, ethnographic painter and expeditionary, as well as the projection of the documentary of the trip and a stand of tourism promotion will be fitted out of the Ecuadorian Amazonia, by the Ministry of Tourism.

The Corporation for Cultural and Tourism Promotion of Ecuador, ProCultur, the Guayasamin Foundation and the Ministry of Culture and Patrimony organize the event, with the support of the Cuban Embassy in Ecuador and the Foundation Antonio Nuñez Jimenez of the Caribbean nation.

That feat was a navigation carried out only by Latin Americans, to prove how the peoples of the region were connected for thousands of years from the Amazon to the Caribbean, explained to Prensa Latina,

Yumac Ortiz, daughter of one of the expeditionaries and organizers of the meeting through ProCultur.

‘We hope that based on our historic memory we learn to unite more and fix whatever is necessary to correct and give importance to the history of our peoples which gives us our identity and strengthen the revolutionary paths. That is what this event looks for’, she added.

The general idea is that new Ecuadorian generations and the world learn about that investigation and the 14-month travel, whose contribujtions were significant from the cultural, archaeological and anthropology points of view, but also valuable for integration, she stressed.

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